OTAs own the default position in AI discovery. Bonafide is building a way in for hotels.
A partnership between Bonafide and Visiting Media targets the structured data gap that lets OTAs dominate AI recommendations by default
Driving the news. Bonafide and Visiting Media announced a partnership on June 17 to help hotels improve how they appear in AI-powered search results. The two companies are combining Visiting Media's hotel content platform with Bonafide's AI alignment technology, describing the result as an end-to-end AI distribution stack for hospitality. The integration is expected to be available to joint customers in mid-July.
The problem. When a traveler asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity where to stay, the answer depends on whose data the model can read. OTAs have spent years building structured, verified, machine-readable inventory data at scale. Hotel data, by comparison, is scattered across property management systems, content management platforms, booking engines, and image libraries — often outdated, rarely structured for machine consumption. The practical result: AI systems default to OTA-sourced information, not because OTAs are explicitly favored, but because their data is there and a hotel's often isn't. Some properties are named with factual errors. Others are omitted entirely.
How it works. Visiting Media holds one of the larger databases of immersive hotel assets — 360-degree tours, photos, and 3D models — across thousands of properties. Its platform uses AI-powered smart tagging to generate rich, descriptive metadata from those assets, making visual content queryable and interpretable by AI systems. Bonafide operates at the data layer: aggregating a hotel's content from across its tech stack, verifying and structuring it into what the company calls a context layer, then serving that context to LLM platforms via an orchestration engine. Together, the two companies are attempting to build a data supply chain that runs directly from hotel to AI — bypassing the intermediaries that currently dominate the flow.
The distribution argument. Bonafide's framing is explicit. "Whoever controls the context controls the recommendation," said Jason Jenkins, the company's vice president of sales, "and right now, OTAs control that context by default." The granularity of the problem matters here. Travelers are increasingly asking AI systems highly specific questions — about room configurations, accessibility features, amenity combinations — that require verified, structured answers at the property level. A traveler asking whether a specific hotel has both a shower curtain and a bathtub gets an answer based on whatever data the model can locate. If that detail lives only in an unstructured PDF buried in a channel manager, it doesn't get surfaced. OTAs have normalized structured data pipelines as a function of their commercial model. Most hotels haven't built the equivalent.
What it means. AI discovery is becoming a distribution channel with its own eligibility requirements. The question is no longer just whether a property has a website or a metasearch listing — it's whether the property's data is structured, verified, and accessible enough for an LLM to read and recommend it. Properties without that foundation aren't ranked lower. They're absent. The Bonafide and Visiting Media partnership is one of the first organized attempts to build that foundation at the hotel level rather than waiting for OTA intermediaries to do it on the hotel's behalf — and on the OTA's terms.
The pattern. Distribution control has always been a function of who controls the data layer underneath the booking interface. In the metasearch era, OTAs won that contest through price and inventory depth. In the AI era, the contest is moving upstream — to the structured context that determines whether a property exists in a model's understanding of the world at all. The infrastructure being built now will determine default positions for years.
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